Why is a raven like a writing desk?

Monthly Archives: January 2011

If you can’t handle something in moderation, it doesn’t matter whether you “should” be able to handle it. Social networking, alcohol, chocolate bars, whatever, … You’ve probably got at least one slippery slope item where a little always seems to turn into a lot.

You don’t cut off things like that because they’re so awful, and everybody must cut them off, but because it’s some personal kryptonite you’ve found out about and rationally must take into account. It’s tempting to say, you ought to be able to handle it, other people seem to be able to, etc., but it’s just about you.

There should be no more shame associated with that fact then there is with having a peanut allergy. I enjoy peanut butter now and then, and it’s no problem for me, but for somebody that’s allergic they must cut it out entirely. Just the way it is. The reality habit.

“Well, just one thing,” said Jobs. “Nike makes some of the best products in the world. Products that you lust after. Absolutely beautiful, stunning products. But you also make a lot of crap. Just get rid of the crappy stuff and focus on the good stuff.”

and

Tim Cook once commented that a traditional management philosophy taught in business schools is to reduce risk by diversifying your product offerings. Apple, he said, represents the anti–business school philosophy. Apple’s approach is to put its resources behind a few products and commit to making those products exceptionally well.

A huge flood hit California in 1861-1862. Because of unrestrained global warming, the likelihood of a similar event is increasing. If it does, it will cost us $725 billion in damages. And those won’t be damages on paper, like a stock market crash, that the government can print more money to bail out, but real damages to power, water, sewer, and property.

HVAC wastes a huge amount of energy because most buildings have no energy use monitoring and their HVAC is not evaluated by a third party to find the ways it’s not working up to spec. (Like profiling and quality assurance of software.)

“Global warming is sneaky. For more than a century it has been hiding large amounts of excess heat in the world’s deep seas. Now that heat is coming to the surface again in one of the worst possible places: Antarctica.”

A carbon tax would be good for the economy. Making polluters pay for the damage they cause seems common sense. It should be politically popular with the majority of voters. But powerful corporations apparently think it would eat into their profits.

According to Dan Miller, “Humans respond best to threats that are immediate, visible, simple, personal, have historical precedent, and are caused by another ‘tribe’ (think Al-Qaeda). Unfortunately, climate change, has none of these characteristics and this may partially explain why so little is being done to address the biggest threat mankind has ever faced.”

“Algae and bacteria are the two most important biofuel technologies of the twenty-first century. As a replacement for oil, algae is extremely practical, utilizes mostly cheap and abundant resources like saltwater and wasteland, and has the potential to reduce global carbon-dioxide output tremendously.”

Growth — the human tendency to devour the Earth and “get it before the hoarders do” — has become enshrined in modern economics as the key metric of economic health. It’s as if medical doctors saw their central mission as trying to increase the incidence of cancer or pituitary gigantism.

“The loss of the chestnut, in terms of the sheer number of trees killed, the size of its range before the blight, and the variety of habitats affected by its demise, is unrivaled in the history of human-wrought ecological disasters …”

Growth simply cannot go on forever if it means consuming ever more of a finite world. Is there an alternate economic system that would incorporate markets, competition, free trade and all the other things economists love, but which would not depend on the growth of material consumption?

“There is one way we could save ourselves and that is through the massive burial of charcoal. It would mean farmers turning all their agricultural waste – which contains carbon that the plants have spent the summer sequestering – into non-biodegradable charcoal, and burying it in the soil. Then you can start shifting really hefty quantities of carbon out of the system and pull the CO2 down quite fast.”

Each year, the nation ’s supermarkets, restaurants and convenience stores toss out approximately 27 million tons of edible food worth $30 billion. And, on average, households waste 14 percent of their food purchases. Fifteen percent of that includes products still within their expiration date but never opened.

“In the 1920s automaker General Motors (GM) began a covert campaign to undermine the popular rail-based public transit systems that were ubiquitous in and around the country ’s bustling urban areas. With help from Standard Oil, Firestone Tire, Mack Truck and Phillips Petroleum, they succeeded in decimating the nation’s trolley system.”

“Ambient information tries to combat data overload by moving information off computer screens and into the world around us. We’re more likely to act on a subtle but continuously present message than an intermittent one.”

We could save the world’s ecosystem if we really wanted to. Consider how one civil servant organized the villagers of India’s poorest state to reforest, including planting almost a billion trees in one day.

“As Harvard’s Martin Weitzman has argued in several influential papers, if there is a significant chance of utter catastrophe, that chance — rather than what is most likely to happen — should dominate cost-benefit calculations.”

It’s said that a typical wooden pencil can write for 35 miles. According to a back-of-the-envelope calculation, the thickness of a pencil line is to the length of the pencil as 10,000 years are to the age of multicellular life on Earth.

“America’s aging electrical transmission system is renewable energy’s Achilles heel, and unless a broad policy consensus to upgrade our electrical grid is forged soon, the potential of wind and solar power will be vastly diminished.”

“Now that I know how many people share this vision, I am more confident than ever that we can bring about this transition. And now that I’ve seen the viciousness of the resistance firsthand, I see more clearly the structural and cultural obstacles we’ll face.”

US carbon footprints are much larger than those of a developing country, but US population growth is as large as that of a developing country. Improving education and access to contraception in US should be green priorities.

as Sinatra works with Nelson Riddle to create a separate reality invulnerable to ordinary suffering, the reality of song at the heart of his maze. And then, again with Nelson Riddle, at the end of one of those ballads that he seems to slow down to a pace almost intolerably slow, so as to sound the very bottom of each note and each thought, he inscribes in the final phrase what might be taken as a symbolic suicide note, a record of inner transcendence, or a demonstration of how deeply he had lost himself in his art: “‘Scuse me while I disappear.”

As the foreign ministers met in Kunming, the adjacent Guangxi province’s development and reform commission announced plans to build a $2.36 billion high-speed railway linking the provincial capital Nanning with Hanoi in Vietnam, Vientiane in Laos, Phnom Penh in Cambodia, Bangkok in Thailand, Kuala Lumpur in Malaysia and, ultimately, Singapore.

The high-speed rail is part of a 300 billion yuan ($45 billion) program over the next five years to create a “Nanning-Singapore Economic Corridor”. Construction of new tracks from Nanning to the border with Laos is due to commence in the second half of this year.

The designated commercial hub of this railway network is Bangkok. The Thai capital will serve as a gateway to new markets for Chinese exports among South East Asia’s 600 million people as the Chinese government seeks to offset declining sales to the US and Europe. Bangkok is the site for a planned Chinese-financed $1.5 billion wholesale trade centre for Chinese goods. The centre will have a total floor space of 700,000 square metres, the size of 100 football fields.

“Coupling robotics and distributed computing could bring about big changes in robot autonomy,” said Jean-Paul Laumond, director of research at France’s Laboratory of Analysis and Architecture of Systems, in Toulouse. He says that it’s not surprising that a company like Google, which develops core cloud technologies and services, is pushing the idea of cloud robotics.

But Laumond and others note that cloud robotics is no panacea. In particular, controlling a robot’s motion—which relies heavily on sensors and feedback—won’t benefit much from the cloud. “Tasks that involve real time execution require onboard processing,” he says.

And there are other challenges. As any Net user knows, cloud-based applications can get slow, or simply become unavailable. If a robot relies too much on the cloud, a problem could make it “brainless.”

I’m not qualified to say. And it hasn’t been accepted for publication yet. The safest bet is usually against anything amazing. But for some reason I’m not ready to count out their data just yet.

If it turns out that the data is accurate, then the following idea from their draft may turn out to be significant, too.

We remark that it is possible to detect the same EMS from the plasma of patients suﬀering from various infections and chronic diseases. The plasma has to be kept fresh and unfrozen. If the plasma is frozen at −70 ◦C then one must extract the DNA in order to recover the signals. The DNA can be also extracted from tissue biopsies. The list of diseases in which EMS have been found (such as Alzheimer, Parkinson, Multiple Sclerosis, various neuropathies, chronic Lyme syndrome, rheumatoid arthritis) indicate clearly that their presence is not limited to diseases known to be of infectious origin: The fact that EMS have been found in diseases not known be of infectious origin is intriguing, and leads us to seek bacterial or viral factors in these diseases.